Linux Blog

How To Harden PHP5 With Suhosin on Linux

Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core.

Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections.

Installation
OpenSuSe user can install Suhosin using "1-click" installer - here

After successful installation check the entries in your /etc/php5/conf.d/suhosin.ini configuration file to suite your requirement.

Restart apache using following command:

# /etc/init.d/apache restart

Make sure Suhosin is working, type following command:

php -v
PHP 5.3.1 (cli) (built: Feb 15 2010 17:27:14)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies
with XCache v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2009, by mOo
with Suhosin v0.9.29, Copyright (c) 2007, by SektionEins GmbH

Check Suhosin project for more detail

Mount, Encrypt and Manage Image file and Physical Disk Drives on Linux - eMount

eMount is a free system administrator tool for Linux that can mount, encrypt and manage disk image files and physical disk drives. It relies on cryptsetup, which implements the LUKS disk encryption specification.

Features
* Create plain and encrypted disk images using one of the following file systems: ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT-16, FAT-32, HFS, HFS+, NTFS, ReiserFS and XFS.
* Create encrypted volumes from physical disk drives.
* Mount system partitions and virtual disks from the GUI or command line. The source can be plain or encrypted. List of supported file systems is O/S dependent. ISO images are widely supported.
* Enlarge disk images (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS and XFS).
* Copy to clone devices and disk images.
* Supports all ciphers and hash algorithms provided by the operating system.

Installation:
OpenSuSe user can install eMount using "1-click" installer - here

Ubuntu / Debian:
Download eMount for Ubuntu / Debian - here
Using the terminal go to the directory containing the file and type:

sudo dpkg -i emount_0.10.0-1_i386.deb

Fedora / CentOS:
Download eMount for Fedora / CentOS - here
Using the terminal go to the directory containing the file and type:

sudo rpm -ivh emount-0.10.0-1.i386.rpm

After successful installation, go to terminal and type command emount to open up the application

How to Accelerates the Performance of PHP Scripts - XCache

XCache is a open-source opcode cacher, which means that it accelerates the performance of PHP on servers. It optimizes performance by removing the compilation time of PHP scripts by caching the compiled state of PHP scripts into the shm (RAM) and uses the compiled version straight from the RAM. This will increase the rate of page generation time by up to 5 times as it also optimizes many other aspects of php scripts and reduce server-load.

The XCache project is lead by mOo who is also a developer of Lighttpd. Lighttpd is one of the fastest web-server programs and outperforms Apache and many other open source web-serving projects so the same is being done to XCache.

If you're interested in some benchmarks of XCache, eAccelerator, APC, etc. then checkout the Five Opcode Cache Comparison on PHP on Fire.

Installation
OpenSuSe user can install XCache using "1-click" installer - here

After sucessfull installation check the entries in your /etc/php5/conf.d/xcache.ini configuration file to suite your web-server requirement.

Restart apache using following command:

# /etc/init.d/apache restart

Make sure XCache is working, type following command:

php -v
PHP 5.3.0 (cli) (built: Oct 27 2009 17:41:09)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies
with XCache v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 2005-2009, by mOo

If you wish to set up XCache administration page, configure an alias in httpd.conf of Apache to point to the admin subdirectory (/usr/share/php5/xcache/admin) within XCache.

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A professional quality Non-linear video editing suite for Linux (KDE) - Kdenlive

Kdenlive is a non linear video editor for the KDE desktop environment. The software provides project management and editing tools while relying on a separate rendering program to perform the editing operations.

It is based on the MLT video framework which relies on the FFmpeg project.

Kdenlive Support is planned for transitions, effects, multiple file formats, and full project and asset management support. The current beta release is capable of editing raw DV or AVI DV files, with tools such as move, razor, and resize, selecting parts of clips using in/outpoints, and exporting the result to another raw DV file.

Kdenlive supports all of the formats supported by FFmpeg (such as MOV, AVI, WMV, MPEG, XviD, and FLV), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both PAL, NTSC and various HD standards, including HDV.

Video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu.

Features include:
* Multi track editing
* Video Preview
* Accepts many audio / video / image formats: mpeg, avi, dv, vob, wav, ogg, mp3, gif (non animated), jpg, png, svg, ...
* Export to most formats: mpeg, dv, vob, realvideo, flash, theora, wav, mp3, xvid, quicktime, ...
* Audio and video thumbnails
* Basic audio / video effects: blur, sepia, volume, brightness, ...
* Basic transitions: crossfade, push, picture in picture
* Real time preview of all effects
* Add markers and guides to easily manage your project
* Copy & paste of clips, effects and transitions
* Easy firewire dv capture
* Customizable layouts
* Desktop integration (add files to your project with drag & drop)
* Multi track view (preview monitor is split in 4 with one track in each part)

You can also control the tool with the keyboard, and switch between the Select, Razor, and Spacer tools from the keyboard. Kdenlive provides the ability to set guides/markers, and you can navigate those from the keyboard by using Alt+ the right and left arrow keys.

Installation:
Ubuntu users can simply copy-paste the following command in Terminal to install kdenlive

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sunab/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kdenlive

Now, simply goto Applications Sound & Video > Kdenlive in your Ubuntu to get a taste of this all new Video Editor for Ubuntu.

OpenSuSe user can install kdenlive using "1-click" installer - here